Hi Gram,
Today was our last day at the Plataran, filled with goodbyes and hugs. I had a hard time getting out of bed, still tired from the past few days, but made my way down to breakfast to make sure I got a chance to see and hug everyone. The food was again delicious and I did a half decent job of restraining myself from going back to the buffet again and again to sample more than I needed. I said my goodbyes to the people who wouldn’t be continuing with us to Nusa Dua and hugged everyone I could to recharge my social batteries.

After breakfast, I walked to an ATM with Sam, then sat in the streetfront cafe chatting about our experiences and life stories with Stephen for a while. When his wife Becky returned from her appointment, we all headed back to finish packing and have our bags brought up front. I felt fancy having someone carry my bags from my room to the front desk, leaving almost all of my worldly possessions with a guy in a uniform while we headed out to grab some lunch. We found a pizza spot nearby with good food and a nice view of the road for a little more people watching before we left town.

Back at the hotel, we met up with our friends, mounted a couple of busses, and headed south. The busses made a stop at the Bali Bird Park, where we took some time to walk around to see and get our pictures taken with a variety of different birds and saw a komodo dragon relaxing in the sun. I wish we would have had more time, but we headed back to the busses after an hour so as not to keep the drivers waiting.

I wasn’t feeling all that great on the remaining ride to the hotel, so luckily the check-in process was smooth and easy. I don’t like to advertise this, but sometimes I have issues that result from my brain damage. I try to present as “normal” or unaltered as possible because I don’t want to be judged or discriminated against, and I don’t want pity. Most days, my brain is up to speed and I feel fine, joking and talking with people, living my best life. I’m able to cover the gaps in my memory and attention, and many people have told me that they wouldn’t know that I’d had an accident. There are some days that I feel like my head is in a fog, and other days where I feel like I’m just run down. On the bus, I was a little dizzy and feeling in a fog, which tends to happen when I get really hot or hungry or haven’t slept well. I was looking forward to a shower and air conditioning.

Before I knew it, we’d been escorted to our rooms where I took the opportunity to cool off and relax. After a shower and some decompressing, I met up with Dash to look for a restaurant. After one failed attempt, we ran into Amy who had a great suggestion. We walked down the beach and found a great little place called Kekab. They set up a table on the beach for us, where we sat with sand between our toes and watched as a man with a guitar sang to us. It was the picture-perfect scene that you might expect to see in a movie – colorful table umbrellas with strings of lights stretched between them, soft live music playing in the background, friends laughing and conversing over fresh food expertly prepared and presented, with a cool breeze taking the day’s heat away – but it wasn’t a movie, we were just living it!

My brain hadn’t recovered completely from the feeling earlier, and I had trouble following the conversation. I was enjoying the experience, the ambience, and being surrounded by friends, but felt like the world had been fast-forwarded a little and I was still at regular speed. As questions were posed or ideas discussed, I wasn’t able to form a response or answer quick enough to participate in the conversation. It felt like a movie where the main character is drugged or hit on the head and the world speeds past him. After dinner, we wandered back to the resort and I wasn’t able to hide my reality. I felt lucky that I was with close friends who watched out for me as I wove down the sidewalk just trying to keep one foot in front of the other. We accidentally walked past our resort at first and double back, then got a little lost in the maze of identical-looking buildings. We eventually made it to our building, David walked me to my door, I found my bed, and immediately passed out.